Walter Levinthal

Walter Michel Levinthal (born April 12, 1886 in Berlin , † November 17, 1963 in Edinburgh ) was a German-British bacteriologist . He was u. a. known as the discoverer of the psittacosis pathogen .

Life and activity

After attending school, Levinthal studied medicine at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg and Munich . He focused on zoology, serology and bacteriology. In 1909 he passed the state examination. He did his doctorate in Berlin. In 1914 he became an assistant. As laboratory director, he devoted himself to the investigation of the so-called influenza bacillus . In 1918 he developed the Levinthal agar.

On January 1, 1919, Levinthal joined the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin as a research assistant. There he continued his studies on influenza and was deputy director of the research department for several years. In this position he was also an examiner at the state school for disinfection personnel.

In 1924 Levinthal spent three months at the Rockefeller Institute in New York . He then continued his research on pneumococci and the variability of diphtheria bacilli in Berlin. As an experimental researcher, he made a name for himself by developing a method for the cultivation of individual cells: with the help of a manually controlled glass needle, he manipulated a single cell within a microscopic chamber and observed its division.

In the course of his research on anaerobes, he introduced the apparatus developed by Fildes for researching anaerobic cultures into the work of the institute.

Politically, Levinthal was left-wing. From November 1926 he and his friend Kurt Großmann edited the magazine Die Menschenrechte for the German League for Human Rights , with Großmann outwardly being the responsible editor.

From April 1, 1928, Levinthal was Fred Neufeld's senior assistant , and later he worked with Kleine.

On March 24, 1930, at a meeting of the Berlin Microbiological Society, Levinthal demonstrated tiny filterable cocoids in the pericardial fluid of artificially infected parrots, which enabled him to prove that they were the causative agent of ornithosis . For this discovery he received the Paul Ehrlich Prize . In the literature of the English-speaking countries is also in recognition of the fact that Levinthal his discovery something from his colleague Alfred C. Coles and Ralph Douglas Lillie - which were independent of him realize the same thing - made even by Levinthal Coles-Lillie bodies the Speech.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Levinthal was dismissed from the service of the Robert Koch Institute. On March 15, 1933, he came into direct contact with the savage SA terror that was prevailing at the time, when an SA troop arrested him after being denounced by institute staff when he was leaving his place of work and kept him overnight in the police prison for alleged defeatist statements. He moved to Great Britain, where he lived successively in London, Bath and Edinburgh. In Bath he worked for the Center of Treatment of Rheumatism. In Edinburgh he did research at the Royal College of Physicians Laboratory , where he stayed until the 1950s.

In Germany, Levinthal was meanwhile classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police forces. In the spring of 1940 he was placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Security Main Office , a directory of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, were to be located and arrested with special priority by the occupying forces following special SS units.

After the Second World War, Levinthal was recognized as a victim of Nazi persecution and was awarded the pension of a professor emeritus from the Robert Koch Institute.

Since 1942 he was a member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

Fonts

• On the breakdown of xanthine and caffeine in the human organism , 1912. (Dissertation)
• Recent Observations on Psittacosis , 1935.

literature

• Obituary in: Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie, Vol. 139, 1964, pp. 137-139. (Translation into English in: Royal Socienty of Edinburgh: Year Book, 1963, pp. 29–31)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kurt Großmann: Ossietzky , 1963, p. 55.
2. ↑ Peter Krebsz: The history of research into ornithoses , P. Lang, 1995, p. 30.
3. ^ Entry on Walter Levinthal on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
4. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed January 1, 2020 .